Is Ego the Culprit?

The ego gets a bum rap: self-centered, egotistical, or having a “big ego”. Ego is to blame for bad behavior, and we need? to have less of it to be a good person. We must transcend the ego, become selfless.

The ego is not the culprit. We are pitting our ego against who we are.?

We can recover our? lost self-grounding in relation to the ego by understanding the psychophysiological process Erich Neumann called centroversion.

“Centroversion is the innate tendency of a whole to create unity within its parts and to synthesize their differences in unified systems. The unity of the whole is maintained by compensatory processes controlled by centroversion, with whose help the whole becomes a self-creative, expanding system.”

At the higher levels of development, ego consciousness is the organ of centroversion.

In contrast to the psychic fragmentation we incur in our mass-minded, artificial world, our natural tendency is toward integrated wholeness. This tendency is innate; literally, we are born with it and through it. It guides our development from the micro-cellular processes of growth to the apex of education, creativity, conscious selfhood, and the desire to serve life.

We grow through compensatory processes, through opposites working in tandem. A human person is an integrated collection of self-regulating systems. Jung observed long ago that the psyche, like? all self-regulating systems, is based on the principle of opposition. It? self-regulates by keeping opposing tendencies in a dynamic balance.

“The formation of the personality, like that of the ego and consciousness, is regulated by centroversion, whose function it is to promote the creative unity of the living organism.”

Centroversion is the organizing principle that binds together the complementary actions of extraversion and introversion (among other pairs of opposites).?Extraversion, the outward orientation to people, things, and action, defends the personality against the “perils of the world.”? Introversion, the inner orientation to thought, feelings, memories, and intuitions, defends the personality against the “perils of the soul.”?

Centroversion protects them both from the peril of disintegration, of becoming too one-sided. When separation? happens, “ the conscious system loses its true significance as the compensatory organ of centroversion whose function it is to represent and realize the wholeness of the psyche.” Self-regulation, the product of centroversion, no longer operates. The personality becomes a disintegrating collection at war with itself rather than a self-creative, expanding system.?

When the movement in one direction becomes extreme, the connection to the opposite breaks down and becomes a separation.

“Following the collapse of the archetypal canon, single archetypes then take possession of men and consume them like malevolent demons...Every conceivable dominant rules the personality, which is a personality only in name..The dynamism of a possessed personality is accordingly very great, because, in its one-track primitivity, it suffers from none of the differentiations that make men human.”

“The aggravating complexities of civilized behavior are swept away in favor of bestial rapacity.”?

“The personal ego-sphere as well as the autarchy of the personality drop away, and all the essential marks of centroversion.”

What we call having a”big ego" is, in truth, operating with a weak,?disintegrated? ego. The ego?seems big because it is inflated. The danger of identifying the ego with an archetype is that it inflates the ego. We believe that the power possessing us is ours, and we don’t realize that we belong to it. The ego is too weak to resist.

If our recourse against having too much ego or being egocentric is through transcending the ego or to become selfless, then what defends us against possession by unconscious contents, or being absorbed into the mass self?? The mass?

The true goals of centroversion are the stability and indestructibility of the personality, where the whole is a self-creative, expanding system. And ego consciousness is the organ of centroversion.